''The prognosis is for a long-lasting global cooling more severe than any experienced

hitherto by civilized mankind." - Kukla, 1972c, p. 41

''Kukla went to work as a government geologist and later, a climatologist at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. With the country firmly in the Soviet Union’s orbit following World War II, scientists were pressed to assist its communist allies. In 1961, Kukla and his family were sent to Cuba, where Kukla helped Fidel Castro’s regime find clay deposits for making porcelain. In his spare time, he scoured the island for climate records for his own research. The Kuklas returned home in 1966 to escalating tension with the Soviets and worsening oppression.

Kukla came to Columbia in 1971, under a one-year exchange program. The Lamont scientist who lobbied for him, Wallace Broecker, soon became a founding father of modern climatology and was among the first to use the term 'global warming'. Kukla managed to stay on, and in 1973 was hired as a senior staff scientist, eventually becoming an American citizen. Having endured Soviet rule, Kukla had learned to choose his words carefully. Once in the United States, however, he became known for his bold, often outrageous, comments.

Kukla helped champion the theory that ice ages come and go as the amount of sunlight falling on earth changes due to variations in earth’s orbit around the sun—an idea first proposed by Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch in the 1920s and 1930s, and now well accepted.''

''I have earlier believed that man may be contributing to the warming at least a little bit, but today I am not so sure even about that.''

George Kukla, email to Nigel Calder, 2010

George Kukla received Milankovitch Medal in 2003, awarded by European Geophysical Union ''for this pioneering study of terrestrial records and for linking past climate changes with Milankovitch's astronomical theory of climate.''